Can evil characters engender sympathy?

Evil characters can engender sympathy to a certain extent, because of course not everyone can be pure evil. Everybody has a little good and evil inside them. Engendering sympathy is just in human nature, and it really can’t be avoided. Only somebody like the devil himself could possibly be pure evil, but other than him, even the evilest of characters can engender a certain amount of sympathy depending on how evil they are. Some characters may just perform evil actions but may have evil thoughts, and some characters may just have evil thoughts but may not even be able to perform these sick and evil thoughts.

For example, the same exact character in Heroes who is supposed to be seen as pure evil does in fact show some sympathy towards some of the other characters in the television show. Usually he kills everybody in sight that has powers, but as the show progresses he slows down on his killings, and only kills if necessary, because he finally realizes he is a killer and doesn’t like it. He feels sorry for the innocent people that he has killed therefore eases up on the murdering.

Even though some characters if not all evil characters engender sympathy sometimes that just doesn’t stop them from killing, or hurting who ever or what ever they have to hurt/kill. Usually you hear this evil individual say, “it’s such a shame I have to kill you,” or something like “It is so sad it must end this way.” Some characters just say that too really show how evil they are, and others really do In fact feel for who ever they are killing/hurting. But they have to do what they have to do. Sympathy is a natural human emotion, and you really can’t get rid of it, because some philosophers have said that we are all born “good” therefore we’re all born with sympathetic emotions, happiness, good thoughts, freedom. Although when we take advantage of this freedom and power we have, we begin to turn evil, although an emotion like sympathy will always stay with us which is why some evil characters are in fact capable of engendering sympathy. In the book "Perfume," the book is about a killer who just kills people for their scent, as crazy as that sounds he doesn't just kill them for the sake of killing, he has a purpose. Therefore he must feel sympathetic that these innocent people must die for his supposed "greater good," as sad as that sounds.

In conclusion, even if a character doesn't show how sympathetic towards others they are, most of them truly do feel sympathetic deep down inside. Characters who have a reason to do "evil," are really the ones that feel sympathetic where the ones that just find joy in killing and hurting people would probably not engender that much sympathy. One would have to be literally heartless to not engender sympathy.